Sophomore Dana Campos grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, where education statistics show many students don't complete high school, let alone go to college.
Last spring, Campos took a class at Tufts in which a professor called the area the "dumbest part of the country."
After their freshman year, Campos and her friend, Brown University sophomore Alma Guerrera, realized how few opportunities existed for children in their own community. Rather than getting a typical summer job, the two decided to "start an organization that will give back to the community," Campos said. "So we created a program called FRIDA - an acronym that stands for Free-thinking, Reflective, Imaginative, Developing Artist."
The program was founded on the hope that a troubled community could recover. "We based this off of a philosophy of community equity building: you look at problems in the community as assets," Campos said. "Instead of saying 'everyone is failing,' we asked 'how can we get more people to college?'"
FRIDA used art to encourage sixth- and seventh-graders in the Rio Grande Valley to have confidence in their beliefs and find ways to express them.
The program aimed to help the pre-teens develop "higher levels of critical thinking skills," Campos said. "We exposed them to Latino issues and encouraged them to form their own opinions."
Seventeen out of the 20 program participants spoke Spanish as a first language. "We ran the program bilingually, which was great exposure for the kids there who didn't know Spanish. Even though it's 98 percent Hispanic in my area, there is a lot of racism - the people who go to college are the white kids," Campos said.
The racism pervaded even FRIDA: "The three participants who didn't know Spanish looked down on the kids who did speak Spanish," Campos said. "But art really leveled the playing field - by the end of the two weeks, everyone really respected each other based on their art."
As FRIDA was a free program, students came from a wide variety of socioeconomic as well as racial backgrounds. "We got some upper-class kids and some lower-income kids from over five different cities from the surrounding area. It was a great place to intermix, because they never would have met each other if not for the program," she said.
After two weeks of working with the kids, FRIDA culminated in a gallery showing open to the community. "We thought it was important that they knew that the community wants to know their opinions," Campos said.
The children's parents appreciated the gallery as well. "The parents were in total awe. I would venture to say that out of the 20 participants, none had ever been to an art gallery before and had never seen an opportunity like this for their kids," she said.
The parents' awe translated to aid for Campos and Guerrera: "So many parents offered help, funding, contacts we could use and venues we could use in the future," Campos said. "They showered us in gratefulness."
Instilling confidence wasn't just about art, either. "We taught them trivial little things," said Campos. "For example, every single day when they walked in to our classroom, they shook our hands, looked us in the eye, introduced themselves and said their names."
Campos and Guerrera's efforts paid off. "At the gallery when they used that skill, everyone was so impressed," she said. "There were sixth-graders walking around being so confident in themselves and their abilities."
The gallery was a huge success for the kids and the community: "There were over 100 community members at the gallery and we had tons of media coverage," Campos said. "It was the greatest experience of my life."
For Campos, the most successful part of the program was seeing a change in how their students carried themselves and felt about their abilities. "There were parents coming up and telling us that they saw real changes in their kids - they weren't afraid to speak their minds and they had been bragging to people about the art gallery," she said.
Campos shared a story about one student who experienced such changes. Guerrera's aunt, a psychiatrist, had recommended FRIDA to one of her clients, a boy with communication difficulties.
"At the end of the program the psychiatrist said that she saw immense changes in him," Campos said. "He called us both and told us his mom had bought him all these paints and canvasses so that he could start making art for fun."
"I started crying - it was the coolest thing ever," Campos said. "I had changed his life."
Campos and Guerrera's goal was ultimately to help their kids pursue better goals in life. "Our hope is that the kind of confidence they got from the gallery will push them into higher education - confidence in your abilities will push you to go to higher [education]," Campus said.
Texas A&M University statistics estimate that only 13 percent of Rio Grande Valley residents have a college education. As such, Campos and Guerrera were somewhat exotic: "We definitely served as role models to them - we both go to college far away, and they wanted to know about college and living in Boston," Campos said.
FRIDA represents a huge accomplishment for Campos. "It was just an idea at the beginning of the summer, then it all came together in the end," she said. "Now we're working on corporate funding so that we can take more kids next summer."
Campos' experience in New England has shown her how important a program like FRIDA can be in disadvantaged areas. "When I came up here, I was in shock about how different it was: there is such an emphasis on education here. People don't even realize the opportunities they had growing up," she said.
